Nadan lamb curry.

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If you compare the meals served in many of the kitchens today to meals served years back, there is one very big difference. Nearly every meal has come from a box, bag, or pouch. Take breakfast, for example. Did you have toast? If so, did you make the bread? Cereal? One of those little packs of oatmeal, all flavoured up and just waiting for you to add water? Did your breakfast originate in the freezer?

If you do a quick survey of your own kitchen, you may be surprised at what you find. I discovered that the best way to clean up my act was to focus on cooking only from scratch. Now, my kitchen has only a few holdouts, most of which are there for food storage purposes.

Some of the most common processed items that “sneak in” are dairy and grain products, bread, yogurt, and pasta. None of these would be incredibly difficult to make, but they are time-consuming. In a world that is ever-increasingly geared towards convenience, few people take the time to roll out noodles or bake cookies these days. Birthday cakes come from the bakery, cookies come from a bag with a convenient tab to reseal it, and bread comes from a shelf at the grocery store, so perfectly uniform that if you put it back and mixed all the loaves up, you’d never find the original loaf. All of this easy-access food has taken a deeper toll than you might imagine.

A toll on our health, our ability to make the simplest item on our own, the time we spend with our families, to the next generation, when we fail to teach them the arts that are vanishing as our grandparents pass away. I still remember my grandmother used to cook fresh snacks from scratch when we return from school.

Cooking from scratch is actually an analogy for today’s society. Scratch cooking is easier than it seems. Media is partly to blame for making it seem difficult to actually cook.

The Nadan dishes from Kerala are prepared scratch mainly using the locally available ingredients. In Nadan cuisine, spices play an important part. The main spices used are black pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves, garlic, cumin seeds, and coriander, turmeric and green and red chillies

I completely agree with your notion regarding made from scratch…in all honesty, though, I have the time. I can understand how women with full-time jobs, kids, and a household to take care of may not have the same luxury. But all in all, I agree – our society pays a price for the convenience, health-wise, and with loosing local/national traditions and flavors. It will be a sad world when kids won’t know what a freshly baked, from scratch, fresh out of the oven loaf of bread is like – compared to the tasteless, full of preservatives thing that comes out of a plastic bag.

Your blog is filled with wonderful recipes and mouthwatering pictures. Thank you so much for following me and letting me know about your amazing space Sumit. Hope I can learn something new from a trained chef 😊.
Keep up the good work…see you around!

Thank you Wendy for the feed back. Happy to know you had a great meal. It’s my pleasure sharing some good recipes. Enjoy the week end:)) And thanks for the link you have shared, it’s “power packed” I would say.

And I’m looking forward to testing out some more. I need to have a trip to Levenshulme to pick up some fresh curry leaves and some other fresh ingredients I think… Glad you enjoyed the link – yep ‘Power Packed’! x

Very true Sumith, we indeed try to buy all the pre packed stuff. Think laziness creeping in or the lifestyle to blame. But I can say after I had started to blog I am venturing on trying to make things from scratch. Coming to the recipe you have shared looks so delish. Would try them sometime. I have seen some of the recipes from Nadan’s blog. But never put my hands on. 👍🏼

Hey Sumith! Wow! Nadan Mutton curry….my favorite! I happen to often visit a mallu restaurant in SG with hubby and friends….mallu food is by far our most favorite food on earth…we are not mallus though! 😀 I always wondered how they make everything “Nadan” 😉 ….Thanks so much for the recipe! Looks yumm! 🙂

We are definitely going to be having this for our tea on Saturday night – which is normally our ‘curry night’ – can you make it the day before? As for breakfast – I’ve been on an ‘egg fest’ as part of my new ‘healthy scratch diet’ however, for the last week or so I feel like I’m ‘egg max’d’ so am on the yoghurt and fresh fruit for a change.. Sounds delicious and I’m looking forward to making it! x